Page 4 of Guarded By The Alpha

He turned and moved toward the exit, and I followed two steps behind—close enough to keep him in sight, far enough to have reaction time if I needed it. My body was still doing the thing where heat pooled in my chest every time I looked at him, and this time I didn't try to file it under anything. I just let it be there, unexplained, and followed him up into the dark.

We made it to the warehouse floor. The loading dock exit was straight ahead, a rectangle of streetlight and city night framed in industrial metal.

He went rigid.

Not gradual. Total, instantaneous, every muscle locking at once.

His hand came back without touching me—a wall of air and presence between my body and whatever he'd just sensed. The hair on my arms stood up.

"We have company." His voice had gone flat in a way that was different from controlled. Stripped of everything but the information. "Don't stop walking."

My eyes cut to the filthy window at dock level.

I saw it.

A figure in the shadows outside, standing with the particular stillness that wasn't waiting. It was watching. Present and patient and not police—not anything that moved the way police moved, the way humans moved, the way anything I'd ever photographed in seven years had moved.

The figure didn't shift when my gaze found it through the grime-streaked glass.

It knew I could see it.

It didn't care.

Someone had been here the whole time. Someone who wasn't Roan Vale and wasn't the trafficking operation and wasn't anything I had a name for.

My camera hand rose before I told it to.

Click.

Chapter 2

Marked as Evidence

NOVA

I was in the passenger seat of a dark SUV before I had a conscious memory of deciding to get in.

The loading dock dissolved behind us, the waterfront giving way to city grid at a pace that read as deliberate rather than urgent. Fast enough to matter. Controlled enough to go unnoticed. I noticed the details anyway, the way I always did—the vehicle was clean, smelled of cold metal and something faintly animal beneath it. A scent I couldn't place. Couldn't stop breathing in.

My camera bag was in my lap. My hands were steady.

That was the wrongness. The steadiness. It should have frightened me more than it did, and the fact that it didn't frighten me at all was its own kind of frightening.

I watched Roan drive. He checked the mirror every eleven seconds. I counted, because counting was easier than seeing the thing burned into the backs of my eyes. Bone reshaping in half-dark. Gold eyes catching light that wasn't there. He hadn't told me where we were going. Hadn't apologized for any of it.

His jaw was set. His hands on the wheel were steady. Once—just once—I watched his right hand flex against the leather before going still again.

He was holding something back. I could read that on him as easily as I read a scene: the effort it cost him, the place where the surface didn't match what was underneath. I let myself wonder, for one unguarded second, what it would cost him to stop.

Outside, the figure from the warehouse window was already miles behind us. It didn't follow. It didn't need to. Whatever it was, it already had my face.

"Ask," Roan said. His voice was low, even. The kind of calm that came from practice, not peace. "You've been holding questions since the loading dock. Ask them."

"Where are we going?"

"Somewhere the thing at that window can't reach you." He checked the mirror again. Eleven seconds. "Somewhere we keep people who need keeping."

"Who's we?"